Agricultural Products Marketing Channel Performance Research

The marketing channel of agricultural products connects consumers and producers. It affects all participants of the agricultural products distribution, and also gives great importance to the agriculture, which is the fundamental industry of the whole economy. What factors influence the performance of agricultural products distribution? What’s the mechanism of those factors? And how to promote the efficiency become key problems for business, governments, and analysts.Lots of scholars from China and other countries have studied these problems and made great contributions on these subjects. According to those previews studies, the key factors that affect channel performance are distributional structure, synergies, and function. On the other hand, after researching marketing distribution of agricultural products in developed countries like US, France and Japan, we fond that proper distributional structure, sound channel synergies and complete channel function are basic reasons for an efficient marketing channel. However, there are a lot of problems in China’s distributions of agricultural products, thus the performance is still unsatisfied.To work out the mechanism among distributional structure, channel synergies, channel functions and distributional performance, this article makes hypothesis among the fore factors according to previews studies and common features in agricultural distributions of several developed economies. By analyzing the data from Yangzhou with SEM., it concludes that distributional structure doesn’t affect distributional performance directly, but through channel synergies and channel functions. Thus in order to improve the performance of agricultural products channel, governments and enterprises must optimize channel synergies and channel functions, as well as channel structure. In China, to construct an efficient marketing channel for agricultural products, we must encourage vertical coordination, promote distributional organizations, improve distribution system, and build up a fair market.